A new system planned for the Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute supercomputing center will enable exciting new
research possibilities across the nation and boost the
university’s international leadership in computational modeling
and simulation, data science, high-performance computing, and
web science.

Funded by a $2.65 million grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF) and with additional support from Rensselaer
and its Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations
(CCNI), the new system will be a national resource for
researchers in academia and industry across a wide range of
disciplines. The planned system will be a balanced combination
of computational power, fast data access, and visualization
capabilities. It will be comprised of a powerful IBM Blue
Gene/Q supercomputer, along with a multiterabyte memory (RAM)
storage accelerator, petascale disk storage, rendering cluster,
and remote display wall systems.

"The IBM Blue Gene/Q system is brand new, and should enable
unprecedented innovations in massively parallel computing for
data-intensive and multiscale research," said Christopher
Carothers, professor in the Department of Computer Science at
Rensselaer, and lead researcher on the new grant. "Many
important research projects are hitting a bottleneck, as the
amount of data they're generating continues to grow, as does
their need to interact with this data. With our new balanced
system, paired with the expertise of Rensselaer faculty and
students, we should be able to help researchers in academia and
industry to overcome many of these challenges."

"Congratulations to Rensselaer for this National Science
Foundation award, which will help further cutting-edge research
possibilities through the new IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer,"
said U.S. Representative Paul Tonko. "This is an important
partnership that helps provide Rensselaer with the tools that
will help push critically needed research projects forward
while educating students who will be the innovators and
technology leaders of the future."

The new supercomputer will be housed in CCNI, with
visualization workstations and a display wall on the Rensselaer
campus in the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing
Arts Center (EMPAC). The new Blue Gene/Q component of the
system will have more computational power than the combined
Blue Gene/L racks currently installed at CCNI, while taking up
less than 1/30 of the space and using only 1/6 of the
electrical power to operate. However, the true power of the new
machine is in its balance: it will be many times faster than
CCNI's current system on data-intensive problems, and the
combination of computation, fast data access, and visualization
will support a significantly broader scope of research.

At Rensselaer, many research projects are poised to benefit
from the new system. These projects include developing new
methods for the diagnosis of breast cancer using data from
non-invasive techniques; modeling plasmas to aid the design and
safety of future fusion reactors; modeling wind turbine design
to increase efficiencies and reduce maintenance; application of
new knowledge discovery algorithms to very large semantic
graphs for climate change and biomedical research, modeling
heat flow in the world's oceans, integrating data and
computations across scales to gain a better understanding of
biological systems and improve health care; and many
others.

Time on the new system will be available to researchers
nationwide. An allocation committee will be formed to assess
proposals, on the basis of scientific merit, fit to the
machine's capabilities, and the potential to broaden the
system's user community and range of research. Rensselaer
scientists and engineers also anticipate collaborations that
will develop and apply the new techniques that will help
researchers take advantage of this machine's unique
capabilities.

"Researchers at Rensselaer have developed highly scalable
techniques that allow modeling to be done across hundreds of
thousands of processors. This machine will further that
research and provide a platform to explore new techniques that
will be broadly applicable to exascale computing," said
Mark Shephard, professor in the department of Mechanical,
Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering (MANE) and director of the
Scientific Computation Research Center at Rensselaer.

Experts in academia and industry anticipate realizing exascale
computing -- performing 1018 calculations per second -- by the
end of the decade. Exascale machines will be more than 100
times the computational power of today's largest machines. The
new Blue Gene/Q system at Rensselaer will be a first stop for
many researchers looking to scale up their research over the
next decade. Once researchers prove their project works on this
system, they will well positioned to migrate to peta- and
eventually exascale systems, including the large Blue Gene/Q
systems due to be installed next year at two national
laboratories.

Rensselaer faculty and students will benefit greatly by
working on these projects, said CCNI Director James Myers.
Since opening in 2007 as the world's seventh largest computer,
CCNI has helped researchers at Rensselaer and around the
country tackle scientific and engineering problems ranging from
the modeling of materials, flows, and microbiological systems,
to the development of entirely new simulation technologies.
More than 700 researchers, faculty, and students from 50
universities, government laboratories, and companies have run
high-performance science and engineering applications at
CCNI.

"The resources we have available at CCNI have enabled
researchers to work at the forefront in the development of
scalable computing techniques and in the application of
computing to some of the most challenging problems in academia
and industry. We're delighted to have the opportunity with this
new machine to continue and expand Rensselaer's support of
leading-edge research and the development of the tools and
expertise that will be required to realize the potential of
next-generation computer systems," Myers said. "With the rapid
changes in computing architecture and the increasing breadth in
how they'll be applied, resources like this are critical for
training the next generation of scientists and
engineers."

Along with Carothers, Myers, and Shephard, co-investigators on
the grant are: Peter Fox, professor in the Department of Earth
and Environmental Sciences and a Tetherless World Constellation
chair at Rensselaer; and Lucy Zhang, associate professor in
MANE.

For more information about CCNI and high-performance computing
at Rensselaer, visit: